There’s a very good reason that (a) Hollywood likes making movies from Dick’s works, but (b) they frequently change much of the story. Hollywood loves the idea of a single man (and note that it is always a man) trapped in a screwed-up world where he must fight the system and somehow escape or change it. Hollywood loves Dick particularly because in his works, the hero is not just caught up in the usual oppression or corruption but is in some bizarre situation that resembles a paranoid fantasy.
Hollywood does not like the fact that Dick’s heroes are not typical action-movie heroes. None of them can be played by Schwarzenegger, Ford, Cruise, Affleck, or any of the other people Hollywood likes to cast without seriously distorting the point of Dick’s stories. Dick’s heroes are not handsome, two-fisted adventurers who fight the system without mussing up their hair and then ride off into the sunset, possibly with their flavor-of-the-month hot-young-babe new girlfriend. They are ordinary people who return to their ordinary lives at the end.
The willingness of Hollywood to change whatever portion of the story they feel like is shown by what Speilberg did to Minority Report. No story by Dick ends with the hero reconciled with his ex-wife and expecting a new baby. Spielberg did that because his movies are always an affirmation of the family. Dick’s stories are by now just an excuse for Hollywood to take some interesting ideas and fit it into their own stereotypes.
Meh, not all of them write for 12-year-olds. There’s also Stanislaw Lem.
Actually, I like a large range of SF. I just don’t care for Heinlein and Asimov because IMO their works are simplistic and their writing is just as bad as Dick’s, but without that near-schizophrenic rhythm that makes his stuff so compelling to me. I don’t understand why some people fawn over those two guys so much, much like you don’t understand why some other people fawn over Dick. Maybe you’ll get lucky and society will get over its cynical phase and embrace the sunny works of the Golden Age. It’s all cycles, after all.
I read that the adaptation of “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” (aka Total Recall) was supposed to star Richard Dreyfuss. I wish I’d got a chance to see that.
